R.F.K.: Life and Death on the Campaign Trail

Forty-five years ago today, Robert F. Kennedy was shot at the Ambassador Hotel, in Los Angeles, shortly after winning the California Democratic primary. Coming on the heels of the death of Martin Luther King, Jr., just two months earlier, the assassination of the forty-two-year-old candidate left the nation reeling with grief; Kennedy’s death, as the poet Robert Lowell later remarked, also “left a generation bereft of its maturity.” In the June 22, 1968, issue of The New Yorker, Roger Angell described the weeks following the tragedy, when Americans were sustained by habit, by “the old elegance of mourning and the release of grief”:

Each morning since the death of Robert Kennedy, we have awakened to the familiar knowledge that some terrible piece of news, some new jolt of the intolerable, awaits us just beyond the borders of sleep. We open our eyes to a corner of the bureau, a soft glint of mirror, morning sounds, and then it comes back… Like an invalid, we are each day less shocked to find that we are ill, each day more absorbed with our symptoms.

In America, “the irreversible is no longer strange,” he wrote; it had become commonplace.

Here we’ve put together a slide show of photographs showing Kennedy in happier times out on the campaign trail. Click the red arrows for a full-screen view. And if you’d like to read more about Kennedy, please check out Hendrik Hertzberg’s review of “Robert Kennedy: His Life,” from our November 20, 2000, issue.

Robert Kennedy in 1964. Photograph by Cornell Capa/Magnum.
Robert Kennedy campaigns in a small Indiana town in 1968. Photograph by Burt Glinn/Magnum.
Supporters of Robert Kennedy in upstate New York during his 1964 Senate campaign. Photograph by Cornell Capa/Magnum.
Robert Kennedy campaigns in Buffalo, New York, in 1964. Photograph by Cornell Capa/Magnum.
A woman in New York City is surrounded by Robert Kennedy portraits (1968). Photograph by Richard Kalvar/Magnum.
Robert Kennedy with eight of his children at Hickory Hill, their home in McLean, Virginia. It was his last weekend before going on the campaign trail in 1968. Photograph by Burt Glinn/Magnum.
Robert Kennedy on Capitol Hill in 1966. Photograph by Bruce Davidson/Magnum.
Robert Kennedy tours Washington, D.C., after the riots that followed the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. Photograph by Burt Glinn/Magnum.
Joan Kennedy, Jackie Kennedy, and Sargent Shriver leave the plane that brought Robert Kennedy’s casket to New York from Los Angeles, where he was assassinated on June 5, 1968. Photograph by Constantine Manos/Magnum.
A family in Harmans, Maryland, pays their respects as Robert Kennedy’s funeral procession passes by on its way to Washington, D.C. Photograph by Paul Fusco/Magnum.

Erin Overbey is the chief archivist of The New Yorker. She has been an archivist at the magazine since 1995.

The fired White House aide has made the President so angry that he’s back to using a favorite campaign-trail insult.

Asian-Americans, a largely made-up group united by historical marginalization, are desperate for a movie like this one to be perfect, because the opportunity to make another might not arrive for another quarter century.